You might have noticed the tag clouds on our new layout.  Our tag clouds have three colors to differentiate the specific sections - categories, features, and locations. These tag clouds help to break up the amount of links to content we have on our site, so it is more easily found by our visitors. Specifically, a tag cloud - sometimes called a word cloud - is a type of list, just reformatted to be more visually appealing. The content within the tag clouds is defined by the content on your site and helps to describe the content in easy keywords.

With most tag clouds like ours, you'll notice a difference in font size based on the amount of entries for a specific keyword. Under our Locations tag cloud, you'll see that our home location of Las Cruces, NM is by far the largest in font size. That is because we have the most amount of content with the Location tag of Las Cruces. Tag clouds help users find what they are looking for by ranking the keywords based on the frequency of use. The keyword "Las Cruces" has the most pages (and in our case, websites) associated with it, and it creates more visual draw to that specific keyword over others in the same cloud due to its size. This makes it easier for our visitors to find websites that are located in Las Cruces. Our tag cloud is also listed alphabetically, which allows a user to scan the entire cloud for the specific term they are looking for.

Once a user clicks on a keyword in the tag cloud, they are immediately taken to a page that lists all pages (in our case, websites) that match that keyword. Clicking on the Photo Gallery tag would take the visitor to a list of all the websites we have completed that contain a photo gallery. If you have a large amount of content or examples on your site and would like to make them easier to navigate for your users, you might want to consider using a tag cloud. Additionally, tag clouds can be used on blogs for similar results, like helping to guide a user to a similar page or article on the same topic.